Saren Taşçıyan's Business Card Reveals Its Secrets Through Microfluidic Magic
Designed to showcase its creators skills as a scientist, this may be the first microfluidic business card in history.
Life and data scientist Saren Taşçıyan has built a business card that uses microfluidics to reveal its designer's contact details.
"There I was, casually browsing the internet, when I stumbled upon a fascinating concept: a business card made out of a printed circuit board," Taşçıyan recalls of the project's origin. "I was immediately fascinated by the idea of showcasing your electronic skills while promoting yourself or your business. Suddenly, inspiration struck: why not explore the real of microfluidic business cards?"
Microfluidics, the science of routing small amounts of fluids through micro-scale channels, represents a big chunk of Taşçıyan's work — so, he reasoned, it makes sense to involve it in the business card to demonstrate his skills, in the same way an electronic engineer would design a PCB-based business card.
Taşçıyan's business card begins as a two-dimensional design with text and a scannable QR Code, which is then converted to 3D at a set extrusion. Channels are added between each object, to provide a continuous path through which injected liquid can flow — and then the whole design is cut out of a solid, ready for printing on an SLA 3D printer.
The printed card is then filled with water, which provides optical properties similar to the resin from which it's printed — rendering the business card's markings near-invisible. Injecting a colored die — or one which reacts to ultraviolet light, for a more impressive demonstration — causes the water to be flushed out of the channels and replaced, revealing the markings piece-by-piece.
More details on the project, and a second design which uses silicone in place of resin, are available in the video embedded above and on Taşçıyan's Hackaday page.